


this wilting world you've wed

by cestmabiologie



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Gen, This is my emotional support fic, but it's a sad one lads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:26:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27502276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cestmabiologie/pseuds/cestmabiologie
Summary: Every person has got a story, whether that story gets told or not.This is a story about a gardener.ca. 1983 & 1998
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 15
Kudos: 38





	this wilting world you've wed

**Author's Note:**

> _Everything's growing in our garden  
>  You don't have to know that it's haunted  
> [...]  
> my resentment's getting smaller  
> No I'm not afraid of hard work  
> And I did everything I want  
> I have everything I wanted_
> 
> \- Garden Song, Phoebe Bridgers

Then 

Every person has got a story, whether that story gets told or not. 

This is a story about a gardener.

As one would expect (or at least hope), plants were easy for the gardener. Plants would tell her when they were in need and it was never all that difficult for her to suss out what they were asking of her. Leaves would wilt and brown and she would know that they wanted watering. Spots would appear and she’d know to search out some source of rot. She could tell when to replant, when to find a sunnier spot, and when to take cuttings. She could coax vigor into the saddest houseplants left to curl into husks next to greeting cards and tabloid mags at the grocers’; she encouraged lilies leaning on shiny plastic picks that read “Congratulations” to hold themselves up by their own strength; she freed African violets from the crackle of cellophane and they would bloom in endless gratitude.

The au pair would bring them home, too, and treat them like puzzles for the gardener to solve. Their apartment became a garden over weeks and months and years. It was never as elegant and manicured as the lawns and hedges of the gardens where they’d first met, but it was a garden nonetheless, tended and tender. Ferns and pothos crowded sills and shelves and countertops.

More than once a day the gardener found herself sweeping potting soil off of surfaces and into her palm like so many crumbs. 

“I don’t know about that one,” said the gardener one day, when the au pair came home with a particularly wild-looking ivy tucked into a plastic bag. It had been collected from who-knows-where (a ditch, as it would turn out).

“That one looks invasive.”

But the au pair was insistent. 

“So we won’t let it outside,” she said. “I think it deserves as much of a chance as any other plant.”

The gardener relented, as she always would when the au pair asked for something (and she so seldom asked for anything). 

The ivy, of course, flourished under the gardener’s care and, as she’d suspected, it was dissatisfied with keeping to itself. It would send tendrils to visit its neighbours. It would bury itself into their dirt and threaten to strangle other, much more polite plants, by their roots. The gardener almost didn’t catch it before it claimed its first, but she did manage to, if not tame it, at least keep it away from her personal favourites. If she sighed and grumbled over the ivy, then she made sure to do it when the au pair wasn’t in the room. Mostly. 

Before 

“You seem young.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I decided my youth was worth wasting.”

And with that there was a hitch in the conversation. Neither of them seemed to have a problem with each other, as far as the gardener could tell, but they both seemed to have a problem with interviews. The housekeeper seemed the meticulous sort with so many priorities constantly rising up and falling down a ranked list in her mind (to her credit, that last remark hadn’t seemed to put her off the gardener as a job candidate). For the gardener, this format recalled every time she’s had to sit in a chair before authority. The gardener hooked the toe of her boot around a chair leg and watched the housekeeper smooth her skirt out (unnecessarily, the skirt was perfectly kept) with her hands.

It struck the gardener then that the housekeeper was a striking woman. She wasn’t sure why this should surprise her. After all, the gardener wasn’t a tottering old bloke in galoshes like gardeners in storybooks, so why shouldn’t a housekeeper be beautiful? 

When she was asked to explain why she was suited for the job, there was so much that the gardener couldn’t say, no matter how honestly she felt it. She knew better than to answer that she’d already decided that the job was as good as hers. She’d already paid a deposit on a little flat above a pub in the village. She’d even bought a plant for the windowsill. A calathea for new beginnings. For the gardener, this was where her story could start. No prologue necessary. 

She couldn’t say that she could see the ritual of returning every morning, the house like a touchstone, to tend to things that were hers alone to tend to. The house would be asleep except for her. Just her and the mist that would curl up off the pond and around her ankles. 

The gardener had gone so much of her life so far nomadic and unrooted by her choice, and just as often uprooted against her will. Here she felt she might be able to settle into herself a little. 

There was a time not so long ago when the very idea of standing still would set the gardener’s feet in motion. In a way it was that same fear that had sent her here, to a village far enough away from, well, far enough from every place that had left her with scars and brick-bruised knuckles and the notion that she was a problem. Since coming to Bly she’d told herself that she was better now at understanding what she could handle until it had felt like truth. By the time she'd found her feet crunching up the path to the manor, she’d begun telling herself that she was sure that she could handle anything.

“Well, for one, you need a gardener. I can tell you’ve been without one for more than a few seasons,” was what she said instead.

“I took a little walk around before it was time to meet. Lots of ferns and old roses. Lovely stuff. But the roses haven’t been pruned in a long time and you could be getting far more blooms with a little tending. I might have to cut a few right to the ground to wake them up. Some of the other plants have gone leggy. 

”It’ll take a lot of work to bring these grounds back, and I’ve got a lot of work in me.”

The housekeeper didn’t ask why the gardener’s previous work was odd jobs scattered across so many counties that it looked like she’d hung up a map in a pub and thrown a fistful of darts at it to build her resume. The housekeeper didn’t ask why the only reference the gardener could cough up was a coordinator from a youth rehabilitation programme (the gardener hadn’t spoken to the coordinator for a few years by then. She hoped that she was still at the same place and that she had good things to say, if she remembered the gardener at all).

Instead, the housekeeper looked at the gardener, really looked at her, and said:

“Yes. I believe you.”

Then 

The gardener could spend hours removing dead leaves from plants, pulling them gently away with her fingers or pruning them when they weren’t quite ready to let go. For her, it was more than the simple satisfaction of clearing death away to make room for blooms. The gardener understood that dead leaves still draw energy. The plant will work just as hard to sustain what’s dead as new buds and leaflings. Pulling away the dead parts frees the plant to focus on living. That’s all customers cared about when they entered the shop: plants that seemed to be effortlessly brimming with life. They didn’t realize the work that went into it.

Under it all the gardener suspected that people weren’t so different from plants in that way. The trouble with people was that they tended to shield their hurt. They cupped their hands around it and held it close, as if something worse might happen if another person saw. Time and experience had granted her a practiced eye for the subtler signs of human pain. Heartbeat-quick hesitations. Disconnected gazes. Tensed fingers and unspoken words. People weren’t so different from plants, but plants were undoubtedly easier. 

The gardener envied plants for their simple existence. She tried to be pragmatic, but she was no different from any other person. She carefully guarded her own anger and hurt (she was so fucking angry and there was nothing to fight) and set them aside, with the briefest nods of acknowledgement, to make room for another’s burden (it was never a burden, not really. She had never met hurt that she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to carry alongside her own). A heart was only four chambers after all, and the gardener would pack them full of everything that the au pair was afraid to feel if she could. 

Sometimes the gardener caught herself wishing for the past, a different past, a version of their story where everything was exactly the same except that there was no darkness crouched inside the au pair. On days off she took herself to the library and pored over microfiche. She made calls to strangers, recommended to her by the cook, trying to piece together a history that had gotten itself tangled up with theirs. She wished to understand, as if understanding might yield a different future. A future that wasn’t a slow and inevitable erosion of days.

But these wishes weren’t practical. They were snatching away minutes and hours. Her only option was to move forward. Each day felt won, perhaps unfairly, a watched pot and all that (the gardener never cared for the expression, but she did regard it nonetheless with a spirit of helpless hopefulness). If she was watchful, nothing might come to pass. 

Before 

Time passed in that inexorable way that was time’s habit. The gardener pulled her boots on before dawn, and she had hair tangled with sweat and dew, clothes and skin streaked with dirt by the time she found herself in the kitchen sharing tea with the cook and the housekeeper and the family if they were about. It wasn’t happiness, exactly, but it was comfortable. Whatever the gardener was caught in, it didn’t feel like forever, but it had a strange gravity that held her in place.

No, that wasn’t quite right. The manor had a strange push and pull, like a magnet flipping over, or the moon fickly pushing the tide and pulling it back on a tether. 

That wasn’t it either. 

It was like cigarettes. Like perhaps Bly might not be all that great for her health. And it didn’t exactly leave a pleasant taste. But if she was gone too long, she felt an itch to go back and dig her hands into it and if she didn’t pay attention she’d be into her second pack by noon. At this point in her life, the gardener felt few stakes in being tied to something that might be slowly burning days off of her time on Earth, but she admitted to herself that she did breathe more easily when she dropped off in her own bed each night. The housekeeper had sold her home to live on the grounds. The gardener understood the choice, but she couldn’t imagine it for herself. She didn’t have any reason powerful enough to keep her beyond the sun’s setting. It was too dark then for her to do her work.

She couldn’t place why she felt this way. After all, the family was darling and they fully lived at the manor. They treated her like an old friend and left her alone to do what she wished with the grounds. The children were good in that they were children who demanded nothing of her. She was an audience to their games and storytelling, and they gave her space without her having to ask.

Even so, she managed to carve out secret spaces, something assuredly hers and hers alone (she knew it couldn’t ever really be hers. Besides nature having no owner, the grounds were hers to nurture and nothing more). She found a spot near the edge of the property that was left wild and forested. It was a spot where she allowed herself to just exist. It was a spot where she could be lonely except for the tender night-blooming vines she exhaustively grew from seed every spring.

Then 

Were the gardener to rewrite her story, it would go something like this:

There was once a gardener. She’d felt many things before she was lucky enough to feel love. She’d had more than a few regrets in her life, and she’d lost so much, but she never did lose that feeling of love once she’d found it.

Her story, stripped of details and evaporated to its essence, would be a love story.

But the truth was that the gardener would never want to rewrite her story. She knew that one day when she would do the washing up, the memory of shattered ceramic would be a monument. Every reflection would someday recall those first nervous touches and kisses so many years ago. Until then, she would comfort herself with the weight and warmth of the au pair asleep next to her, the reassurance that she was still there. Forgetting any moment felt like a betrayal. If anything, she felt like she should remember everything doubly, a copy to keep, and one to telegraph through her fingertips as they brushed along the au pair’s skin (memorizing this, too). Reminders for them both. 

**Author's Note:**

> _Some day Darling, when you're dead  
>  With this wilting world you've wed  
> [...]  
> Darling, I still hear you laughing.  
> But only for a minute  
> And then you're gone a minute  
> And then you're long gone_
> 
> \- I Still Hear You, Adrianne Lenker
> 
> Thank you for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed!


End file.
